The Trials of Worth

You'd be surprised just how varied different defintions of worthiness and value can be.

A big question I see newer designers / developers asking on forums or in emails is how much to charge for the work that they’re doing. And everyone will give the generic response of charge what you think you’re worth. If you have less than a year of experience your work might be worth less than someone who has been doing it for the past 10 years. The problem though is that not everyone goes by this mantra and you can see some negative effects coming from that.

For example, my father has a side business he is trying to start up and his partner decided to go with a local designer instead of choosing me for the web design. No big deal, I was curious to see what came out. But then when my father provided me with a link I was appalled. A site built using frames and images / scripts that come from free download sites back from the early 90s. So being that it’s family I was privileged to know how much the site cost, and it was easily 3 times what I would’ve quoted the site to be.

So maybe I’m under charging for my talent, but I think the real story is that some people are vastly over-estimating their worth in today’s web development world. Maybe I’m just out of touch and the mantra has changed for a web designer; charge the client however much you think they’ll pay regardless of your worth. That to me doesn’t seem ethical at all, but I’ve noticed a lot of sites on the web that look like they were put together in a few hours inside of Microsoft Frontpage.

What has the world come to?